Almost Perfect

Chip Foose is the hot-rod world's newest million-dollar man.

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As if stirring an invisible martini, Chip Foose swirls a Sharpie pen in a circle two inches above a sheet of paper. His hand sinks down slowly, and the pen draws a perfectly round wheel. Now— squitch! squitch!—big arcs go zooming across the paper. He draws a cone— zip! Below that— seeschik!—dangles a sort of horseshoe. From whatever part of the brain that can recognize objects from a jumble of ink scratches, a single message starts flashing. It says, "Cooool."

Foose points the pen at a naked-steel car frame with a flathead Cadillac V-8 bolted to it. "It's as if some World War II airplane pilot missed his airplane, and we're building it." Off in a corner, a stack of metal sheet stock waits to be hand-rolled and hammered into a car body vaguely resembling a shark-mouthed Curtiss P-40 fighter plane.

After just six years in business as his own boss, ace hot-rod designer and fabricator Chip Foose has risen so high that he has transcended his own chopped-and-channeled subculture. Foose's Overhaulin' television show airs on the Learning Channel, and he enjoys close ties to Ford chief designer J Mays. The friendship reputedly had an impact on the '05 Mustang's shape and will influence the wow rating of future Fords.

But it is Foose's storming of the Ridler, the Kandy-colored equivalent of the Best Picture Oscar, that has made him alpha dog in hot rods. Three of the past four Don Ridler Memorial Awards at the Detroit Autorama show in March have been placed on cars built by Foose. The latest one, on Ken Reister's 1936 Ford roadster, was described by one Autorama official as "the closest thing to a perfect car that we've ever seen in this business." Foose has also jacked up the quality and cost benchmarks in the hobby. They are now so stratospheric—a million bucks might get you the Ridler—that some in the notoriously egalitarian hot-rod community want to change the trophy selection rules to make the contests more open.

You have to remind yourself of Foose's impact when you meet him at the headquarters of Foose Design in Huntington Beach, California. Behind closed iron gates and a sign indicating limited visitor hours is nothing more than two industrial-size garage bays filled with disemboweled cars, ancient metal-working tools, a paint booth, and a one-room office. What won't cram into the small building goes into some steel sea containers parked in the courtyard.

Foose, 41, doesn't swagger with that angry-guy shtick exuded by other nuts-and-blowtorch TV stars. You'll find big boyish grins under a wave of sandy blond hair and a patient answer even for a dumb question. Raised in white-collar Santa Barbara, the car-doodling kid of a shop foreman for the AMT plastic model company speaks in middle-class vanilla and doesn't waste syllables on war stories or windy pontificating.

Foose's recipe for cool: "Just try to make the lines work together until you've got some harmony. It's all about proportions."

Foose on how he would do a mass-production car: "Design your interior first, then your vehicle. If you need bigger wheels to keep the proportions right, go to bigger wheels. You'd have better-looking cars if they did that."

Foose on his role on the Mustang: "I was in the studio when they were doing the clay work, but I just had conversations. I didn't actually get my hands dirty and work on that car."

Foose on what he'd like to do next: "I'd like to take a Ford GT and style it with a '60s-era Mustang body. It'd be the most outrageous Mustang to date."

Followers of Foose (his PR agency will be happy to furnish you with a bio) know that he met Tucker designer Alex Tremulis at a tender age and was encouraged to enter design school. He did, eventually, graduating in 1990 from the auto industry's premier pizzazz factory, the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Various jobs had Foose headed for a career in Detroit's cubicle sprawl until, in 1993, the ranking Jedi Master of hot rods, Boyd Coddington, offered him a position designing and managing car builds.